Board

StarKist, a leading food company in the United States, was facing significant challenges in managing its supply chain. The demand planning function and the financial planning and analysis team were using separate sets of spreadsheets to track inventories and orders for 100 key accounts and 200 product SKUs. This disjointed approach was not only inefficient but also prone to errors, especially when dealing with new SKUs, discontinued SKUs, and customer allocations. The supply chain's reliance on an SAP ERP for production planning resulted in a massive amount of data accumulating in a complex spreadsheet that was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Furthermore, the lack of real-time data between the supply planning and demand planning functions made it impossible to conduct in-depth analysis of SKU traffic or to quickly respond to volatile market conditions.

EDEKA Northern Bavaria-Saxony-Thuringia, a regional group of the EDEKA network, was facing challenges with its legacy planning systems. The company, which supplies around 900 retail stores, was dealing with increasing data volumes and growing requirements that its existing systems could not handle. The company's Excel-based planning processes were also proving to be inadequate, with employees spending more time preparing the data than analyzing the information it contained. The company's legacy planning system was unable to handle demands such as displaying tour utilization or logistics packing densities, and performance was no longer sufficient for smooth operation. The company was also facing issues with data loading times, which could take up to 24 hours for larger amounts of data from SAP. These challenges led the company to seek a new, more powerful solution for planning, reporting, and analysis.

Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE), a global agribusiness group specializing in coffee and tea, was facing challenges in managing its commercial steering and financial management. The company, which operates in over 80 countries and generates annual sales of more than €5 billion, needed a tool that could consolidate the progress of negotiations in relation to the initial budget and analytically manage all customer investments by category. The tool also needed to support the S&OP process, manage product/customer mix, pilot pricing strategy, and ease the exchange of information between different services. On the financial control side, JDE required a solution that could value plans by segment, brand, and customer, steer profit up to full P&L (real + forecast), and facilitate budget comparisons and reporting.

OTC Industrial Technologies, a rapidly growing industrial solutions provider, faced significant challenges in managing its financial processes across 65 branches and 54 service/repair locations. The company had grown through the acquisition of 30 companies, each with its own ERP system. OTC's initial strategy was to patch together these disparate ERP systems to manage their financial processes, particularly financial consolidation. However, this approach resulted in a lengthy and inefficient consolidation process. The company had to deal with multiple General Ledger (GL) systems and detailed financial and sales reports coming from various dimensions across the business. The consolidation process was not only time-consuming but also lacked the efficiency and accuracy required for effective financial management.

Sogegross, a large-scale Italian retailer, was faced with the challenge of managing a complex supply chain and financial planning process. The company needed an operational and organizational information system that could align their business needs with IT requirements within their intricate retail chain. The complexity of their operations required a planning solution that could transform an unstructured information system into a more standardized and functional one. Sogegross' supply chain includes seven platforms dedicated to specific types of products, including fresh food, fruit and vegetables, fish, meat, dry and fresh discounters, packaged food, and frozen products. Annually, they manage over 65,000 tons of fresh products and more than 33,000,000 boxes of packaged goods.

Tyler Technologies, a leading provider of end-to-end information management solutions and services for local governments, faced significant challenges following a period of substantial growth. The company had acquired numerous software solutions companies, increasing its revenue threefold. This growth, however, presented a series of challenges, particularly for the finance team. The team was struggling to keep up with the increased business demands, obtain necessary data for efficient analysis and reporting, incorporate acquisitions into their systems, and maintain consistent reporting. The company's structure, built through a series of acquisitions, meant that each division had its own Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team performing planning and forecasting. The data was then sent to the Corporate FP&A team for consolidation, a process that was manual, static, and prone to errors. The lack of a central repository for plans and forecasts further complicated the process. The company needed a new system that would be reliable, speed up consolidation time, standardize all planning and forecasting activities, and have user-friendly drill-down capabilities.

Andbank Group, a banking and financial services company with over 90 years of experience in private banking and comprehensive wealth management, was seeking to improve its performance. The bank aimed to integrate its financial planning, analysis, and sales processes while maintaining the unique logic and business rules of each business function. The challenge was to find a solution that could address all financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and sales planning needs across the entire commercial structure, from the CEO to each banker. The bank needed a tool that could transform its management control department from a cost center to a business generation center and empower the organization to manage the profitability of its products and customers with greater agility.

Forico, an integrated timber plantation, forest management, and timber export business based in Tasmania, was grappling with the challenge of managing a large-scale forestry operation. The company oversees more than 170,000 hectares of forest in the island state, a task that necessitates the consolidation of vast amounts of data. The existing data management and reporting methods, primarily spreadsheets and other platforms, were proving inadequate for the high volume of information. The company was in dire need of a more streamlined data management and reporting method that could handle the large data volumes, reduce manual errors, and quickly identify data discrepancies.

Piazza Italia, a leading Italian multi-channel fashion retail enterprise, was facing challenges in its HR department. The company wanted to transform its approach from merely performing tasks to setting challenging objectives and a strategic vision capable of adapting to sudden market changes. The company was operating in a volatile market that often required swift changes to short-term strategies. The traditional KPIs used by the company were mostly focused on internal processes with little orientation towards business results and growth. The completion of goals was defined by accomplishing a set of actions or tasks within a time frame, which did not offer substantial strategic value. From a commercial perspective, Piazza Italia needed to control two large cost items: the cost of sales and the cost of labor. Traditional budgeting tools integrated with payroll and attendance tracking software were found to be inadequate for the company's needs.

Pixartprinting, a major European player in online printing services, was facing challenges in automating its planning processes. The company was using Excel for strategic planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes, but this approach was proving inadequate for the new competitive market challenges. The company was also undergoing a simultaneous change in the ERP system in some of its branches, making it the right time to replace the spreadsheet-based approach with a more advanced solution. The main challenge was the lack of collaboration across departments due to a data-silos approach and information redundancy. This resulted in difficulties in driving planning, forecasting, and business modeling processes. Pixartprinting needed a tool that could provide a comprehensive view of the company’s information, ensure fast responses when querying databases, make scenario simulation easier and more intuitive, and automate relevant planning and analytics processes.

RDM Group, a leading producer in the recycled cartonboard business, embarked on a complex journey to embed digital intelligence across the entire organization. The Group aimed to incorporate AI, no-touch transactions, augmented reality, and Bot technology into its operations. However, the Group faced challenges with its existing processes. These processes were not integrated, data and insights were stored in silos and only sent electronically on request, and information analysis was manual and ad hoc. The Group needed a solution that would integrate and automate processes, provide real-time visibility of data, introduce descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics practices, and enable data sharing across different departments, professional functions, plants, and headquarters.

Biobest, a global leader in integrated pest management, biological control, and pollination, faced a complex challenge of balancing production capacity and demand. The company operates in an industry characterized by long production times of up to 16 weeks, fluctuating levels of demand, and variations in crop yields due to their biological nature. This created a complex balancing act between available production capacity and demand. The company was also grappling with the challenge of treating each subsidiary as a separate business entity, which led to disjointed operations and inefficiencies. Additionally, the company was heavily reliant on Excel-based forecast templates to collect information from customers and distributors, which proved challenging to keep up-to-date.

Macquarie Telecom Group, a leading data center, cloud, cyber security, and telecom company based in Australia, was facing challenges in its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes due to significant growth. The company was struggling with disparate data sources across the Office of Finance and the wider business, which made it difficult to standardize financial data. This lack of standardization was hindering the company's ability to gain clear insights to lead planning effectively. The group needed a platform that could add structure and capability to its FP&A processes, enabling it to enhance essential finance functions and gain clarity into its business.